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UX Glossary | P

Proto persona

Also: Assumption persona, Provisional persona, Lean persona

A persona built from the team's existing assumptions rather than new research, meant to be tested and corrected later.

Main user, draft unproven Works in procurement ? Checks it on a phone, on site ? Checks it at a desk, mostly Approves in under a minute ? Wants fewer notifications ? Reports to a plant manager ? 1 Write the beliefs down 2 Flag the 3 riskiest 3 Test those first Then replace it with a researched persona Main user, draft unproven Works in procurement ? Checks it on a phone, on site ? Checks it at a desk, mostly Approves in under a minute ? Wants fewer notifications ? Reports to a plant manager ? 1 Write the beliefs down 2 Flag the 3 riskiest 3 Test those first Then replace with research
Proto persona, assumptions to test Every line on a proto persona is a question. Test the few that would change the design most, and the card stops being a guess.

A proto persona is a persona written from what the team already believes about its users, before any dedicated research. It is a hypothesis in persona form, and it should be labelled as one.

What it is for

Every team has beliefs about its users, usually unspoken and usually in conflict. Writing a proto persona drags them into the open. Put five colleagues in a room for an hour, ask them to describe the main user, and the disagreements show up quickly: one imagines a procurement manager, another a field technician. That argument is the valuable part.

The proto persona then does two jobs. It gives a young project something to design against when there is no time or budget for research yet, and it tells you what to research, because every claim on it is a question. “Checks the product on a phone, on site” is either true or it is not.

Common mistake

Letting it harden. A proto persona that is quietly promoted to “the persona” without validation is the worst kind of persona: confident, detailed and made up. The fix is cheap. Mark the document as assumptions, list the three claims that would change the design most if wrong, and test those first, through interviews or contextual inquiry.

After validation

Once research confirms, corrects or discards the assumptions, the proto persona is replaced by a qualitative persona or a statistical persona, depending on the method.

Knowing the words is the easy part.

If you'd rather have someone apply them to your product, that's what I do.

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